Microsoft Slashes 9000 Employees, Musk Threatens to Start a New Party, Top Stories

Microsoft slashes another 9,000 jobs and Ford CEO says AI will wipe out half, that's right, half of all white collar workers in the future. What does this mean for your career? The Dalai Lama rejects China's influence and commits to reincarnation the old fashioned way. Well, past controversies still linger and in a stunning twist it Elon Musk threatens to form his own political party aimed squarely against President Trump. Plus a $250 Trump branded perfume. What does victory actually smell like? All that and more right now on the communiverse with TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. I am TJ and this is a show about business, technology and culture, decoded through the lens of communication and all designed to boost your personal success. That's what we're all about. I bring to you my background and experience for decades of being a world class media trainer and presentation coach to Wall street leaders, CEOs, presidents of countries, prime ministers, Nobel Peace Prize winners and professional athletes. So now you're going to learn the inside secrets of what those people paid me to teach them. Let's go first right now to top story coming out from the business world. The CEO of Ford predicted, this is as reported by the Wall Street Journal this week, that half of all jobs are going to be wiped out. Now that's pretty stunning. Additionally, Microsoft has some bad news. Microsoft is laying off roughly 9,000 employees, about 4% of its global workforce, according to the New York Times. The cuts follow 6,000 layoffs last quarter and come despite the company reporting strong earnings and reaching a 3.7 billion, excuse me, trillion dollar valuation. It's hard to get used to using that T word when describing valuations of companies, but Microsoft is there at $3.7 trillion in valuation. Microsoft says the move is part of an organizational change necessary to best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace. The reductions come as Microsoft pours billions into artificial intelligence infrastructure with tools like GitHub copilot now surpassing 15 million users. Now the company's not alone. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently told staff he expects AI will shrink its corporate workforce over time. And as I mentioned right here with the Ford CEO getting news this week, he's predicting that half, half of all white collar job, not just the worker bees, but white collar jobs are going to be taken over by AI in the very near future. So what does that all mean for you when it comes to your career? Well, I got to tell you, it means you should be scared. I should be scared. We should all be scared. Now I Don't want to be a fear merchant and a fear monger, but this AI stuff is real and it's good. Yes. Does AI hallucinate the large language models elucidate? Yes, it occasionally does. I'm using a lot of it in some of the research for this show and some of the scripts. Although what I'm telling you right now is not a script. So I apologize in advance if it makes any mistakes. But I got to tell you, it has done the work of probably four or five professional writers, researchers, and I would not have been able to afford to create a show if I had to hire a huge staff and spend a half a million dollars in salaries before I even start. So that's why we all have to pay very attention now. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, Ford CEO Jim Farley said artificial intelligence is gone. Going to replace literally half of all white collar workers in the United States. AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind. Together, these announcements suggest a growing corporate consensus. AI isn't just enhancing jobs. That was the spin before. It's now eliminating them. So what does that really mean for you now in the long run? And I don't know if that's 10 years or a hundred years from now, we could make all human work superfluous, irrelevant. I don't think we're going to be there for a while. What it does mean, though, is the world is increasingly going to be divided into two groups. Those who know how to harness the power of artificial intelligence, and those who kind of sit back and say, well, you know, I'm not a techie and this AI stuff is tough. I'll leave that to other people. Those people are going to lose their jobs. I don't say that with relish. I don't look forward to anybody losing their job. But capitalism is a force in and of itself. And yes, it can be softened, it can be mollified, it can be adapted through legislation, through policies of any one country, any one state, state, any one city, any municipality. But ultimately it is extraordinarily powerful because it is connected by every single customer consumer on planet Earth. That's bigger than the jurisdiction of any one government boundary. And because of that, it's very hard for anyone, local official, city official, or state official to say, you're not going to fire those people because AI can replace it. You're going to keep their jobs. It can't be done, or certainly can't be done very easily on a widespread basis. Now, people have tried that. The Luddites tried that. And you know what? The cotton gin prevailed. Weavers, automatic weaving systems took place. Nobody wants to spend $500 to have a shirt weave woven by hand from cotton by someone doing it manually the way they did 200 years ago. We're not going back to those days. We're not going back to the days when in 1960, 400,000 people, mostly women, were employed to do this, to make phone calls. Those of you listening on the audio podcast, I'm pretending to pull out an old fashioned plug and putting in another one the way telephone operators did. Technology got better and all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of phone operators were no longer needed because the technology got better. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, it's not just the assembly workers making a Ford. It's the people coming up with the marketing, it's the people coming up with the advertising. It's people coming up with corporate communication tools who are going to see their jobs eliminated. Don't take it from me, take it from the CEO Jim Farley. Look at a company like Microsoft. Now, I don't know if you know anyone who works at Microsoft. They usually hire really smart people, highly educated people, quite often people who went to the best schools, top of their class. They're getting laid off, not because they're dumb, not because they're lazy, but because Microsoft has figured out a way of delivering its products, its services. And it does a lot of consulting services these days to customers with fewer people. And if you're the CEO of Microsoft, you could say, gosh, I don't want to fire somebody and I'd like to keep them all, but my shareholders are going to say, what are you doing? You threw away billions of dollars. We're now going to fire you. These are the sorts of pressures CEOs are under. And essentially today all of us are CEOs of ourselves, of our own business. I'm the CEO of TJ Walker Inc. You're the CEO of your name, Inc. And we have to make tough decisions on what to allocate, how to allocate resources. And increasingly there are resources of our time, what we put energy and focus and attention to. And the big companies are spending their time focusing on artificial intelligence. I would highly recommend that you do the same. I know I do. Every single day I spend time trying to learn a little bit more about artificial intelligence because I don't want to become irrelevant. That's why I've created things like TJ Walker AI, an artificial intelligence clone of myself, not because I want my clone to put me out of business. I own my own clone, so my clone can't put me out of business. It can offload certain tasks I don't want to do. It can service clients and customers at times when I'm asleep. But I'm trying to get ahead of the game now. You might not ever want a digital clone of yourself or a video clone. You may think that's ridiculous or silly or egotistical or something. I'm here to tell you whatever it is you do, chances are somebody who does something a little bit similar to you has already figured out a way to use artificial intelligence to do what they do better, faster, less expensive, help more people. I don't care if you are a CEO or if you're a media company or if you are selling companion services. I'll use delicate phrasing there. Whatever it is you do, you're a part of a broader industry. And there are people out there right now figuring out how to use artificial intelligence in a way that makes them more effective and if nothing else, saves them a lot of time. I'm going to try to cover about 10 stories today. It would have taken me a long time just to write the summary notes, the introduction scripts for each one, and confession. I did in fact work with ChatGPT to write the introductory script. Not anything I've said in the last five minutes, but the introductory scripts were written for me by Chat GPT. If you like it, don't like it, you can let me know. I can see your comments right here. We are live right now, so if you want to comment what you like, what you don't like, what you agree with, please go ahead and do so now. If you're watching this on demand, you can also leave comments as well. A lot of interesting stories in the news. Let's go to the next one. This relates to to the Dalai Lama. Now, the Dalai Lama is revered in the United States and around the globe. He is seen as someone as thoughtful, peaceful. Let's hop right into this story right now. I'll share with you some of the key thoughts as the Dalai Lama facing mortality as we all are. But he is age 90 and that is a time when people start to think of their their legacy and what next. So we're going to switch into that story in just a moment. The Dalai Lama says his successor will be chosen the traditional way through reincarnation. That means Tibetan Buddhist monks will search for a young boy believed to be the Dalai Lama reborn. After the current Dalai Lama dies, senior monks interpret Visions, read omens and travel to identify children who exhibit signs of spiritual continuity. Once found, the child is educated for years before assuming the role. By this time, China may want to interfere, insisting it could pick the next Dalai Lama. The current spiritual leader, now 90, pushed back this week, saying no one else has any such authority to interfere. His comments were aimed directly at Beijing. The process could take decades and comes with political risk. In 1995, China kidnapped a child chosen by the Dalai Lama as the Panchin Lama, a top religious figure, and replaced him with a state approved puppet. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama faces lingering backlash over a viral 2023 video where he asked a young boy to suck my tongue and actually suck the tongue of a young boy, which is apparently a custom there, but is one that strikes many Westerners and other people around the world as kind of odd, as kind of weird, and in some ways strikes some people as sexually abusive. Now, speaking of sexual issues, the Dalai Lama has been criticized for his past stance criticizing homosexuality. He's seen these days as a force for liberal progressive values around the world, but he has been historically anti homosexual. So what does all of this mean? What's the message here? What is significant here? I do think I try to call it like I see it. I try to be objective here, looking at issues in the news through the lens of communication to help you develop your own career more successfully. So it strikes me that when conservatives say a lot of people in the media and in broader culture in America on the liberal progressive side are hypocrites, and they point to the Dalai Lama, they do have a good point. Because in the United States, if you talk to a typical centrist, moderate Democrat, liberal progressive, and you say, okay, Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, two people no longer with us, but who proclaim to speak the word of God in current public affairs and say, here's what God wants you to believe, and when it comes to politics and public affairs, and I've been anointed by God to tell you what's right and wrong, they scoffed at that. They said, that's ridiculous. These people don't represent God. They're charlatans. They're con men. Here we have someone, the Dalai Lama, who purports to be reincarnated by God, anointed by God to be the leader of God, to lead a country or a people in this case. And a lot of liberals say, oh, you're appointed by God, no problem. That makes perfect sense. Why is it okay when it's for someone who seems like they're for progressive values, but anointed by God on the other side of the world. And yet here in the United States, someone says I'm anointed by God and they have conservative political beliefs. It's seen as ridiculous. There is some hypocrisy there. I like to be consistent according to set principles. And that is you lost me when you told me you were appointed by God or picked by God. If you want to believe that, that's fine. But I don't know why I or anyone else should believe that any one person was anointed with perfect power by a God or a hobgoblin or a ghost or anyone else. It just doesn't make sense to me. And I don't know why anyone who frankly believes in democracy would go for that. The whole concept of democracy is the idea that gods are not there picking leaders and telling people who has to lead a particular country. There's no God picking out one person saying you have more authority and power to lead others than anyone else. The whole concept of democracy is power should reside with the people, not from above, not from a deity or a pretend Santa Claus in the sky, but by things like votes. That's the concept of democracy, which a. The Dalai Lama seems like a great guy, certainly the last 20 years. Most things that come out of his mouth I would say sounds pretty good. But this idea that you're gonna die and your spirit or whatever it is is going to be putting some boy in a committee of guys is gonna. First of all, what about girls? Now, apparently the Dalai Lama says it could come back these days as a girl, but the history of that whole Dalai Lama institution, very sexist when it's eliminated half the population of the world because girls were not supposedly eligible to have this deity reincarnated. It certainly sounds like a made up way for a bunch of guys to keep power in their own hands. Moving on to other news, Dan Rather is in the news. For those of you don't know him, he was probably the most famous person in America for about 20 years, from 1982 to the early 2000s when he was the face of CBS News. He's now in the he's now in the news commenting on what has happened to his former employer, CBS News. Big news going on there. Let me give you a brief summary of that. Right now, Dan Rather is slamming Paramount Global for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Trump had claimed the 2024 segment was deceptively Edited to make Harris look polished and composed while cutting his own remarks to appear incoherent or combative. He argued it caused political harm during the campaign and damaged or demanded financial damages. But media law experts almost universally called the lawsuit frivolous, citing strong First Amendment protections for editorial decisions in broadcast journalism. It was a sellout to extortion by the president. That's what Dan rather told Variety. 60 Minutes did nothing wrong, he added. Trump is forcing a news organization to pay millions for doing protected reporting. Rather says Paramount settled not out of legal fear, but to secure regulatory approval from a Trump controlled Federal Communication commission for its $8 billion Skydance merger. Quote, if major news organizations kneel before power, then we all lose. Now this, this story is troubling it many, many levels. First of all, I don't care where you are in the political spectrum. I would contend no serious legal scholar really thinks that Trump has a legitimate case. What's going on here is, as Dan Rather pointed out, pure extortion. President Trump's administration can control. If the owner, Sherry Redstone, the owner of CBS's parent company, can sell her company to another, bigger, richer billionaire, she wants out. She has squandered the fortune that her father created when he created this media conglomerate. She's trying to figure out, how can I quickly get out of this before I lose another $50 million a day? And she's losing a tremendous amount every single day. So a payoff is what happened. And it really spits in the face the whole concept of a free press in America. First of all, if CBS is guilty of defaming or slandering or whatever damaging President Trump because of a fairly mainstream report, then Fox News Channel is guilty of billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of damages to every Democratic candidate in the United States. Now, I'm not suggesting that every Democrat sue Fox News, but this idea that, that Trump can say, all right, I don't like something you said about me. You weren't 100% positive to me. Therefore, I'm going to use the power of the federal government to essentially torture you and put you out of business or rob you of economic ability to profit is something extraordinarily scary when it comes to the United States and to anyone who believes in democracy. So let's put this into context. This is what authoritarians do. This is what fascists do. This is the sort of thing that happens on a routine basis in Hungary today, in Turkey, in Poland. These are the sorts of things that Modi is doing in India. And hello to all of our good friends watching in India and I, I love the roughly half a million students of mine in India. But modi is very much an authoritarian, what's another word for authoritarian? Fascism. And it's happening today across the globe. It happened in Italy in the 1930s and 40s. It happened in other nearby countries to Italy. And I realized that offends people. But we are seeing it again and again with these attacks on the media. Now, some of you may be saying, well, T.J. you're not being fair. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, recently sued Fox News because he didn't like something they said. No, no, that's not what happened. Fox News told a story again and again and again that Gavin Newsom lied, saying he had not talked to President Trump. Gavin Newsom specified the date he talked to Gavin to President Trump and then said a day or two later, I've not talked to the president in the last two days on a particular issue. And Fox News repeatedly put out a story calling Gavin Newsom a liar and saying that here's the proof. And they pointed to a date several days earlier which Gavin Newsom had already told the entire world he'd had a conversation with the president. So factually, it just made no sense whatsoever in a linear timeline way, what Fox said made absolutely no sense. Yet they stuck to their guns. They said, we're going to keep calling this guy a liar. We're going to keep saying, stating the lie, even though confronted with the facts. And Gavin Newsom simply wanted a retraction. He wasn't given it. He's suing for millions now. He's not going to get any money from it. Why? Because Gavin Newsom can't torture the owners of Fox News and prevent them from selling themselves and preventing them from making billions of dollars the way President Trump can with respect to CBS News. So that's the big difference. So a lot of things going on in the world of the media. Let's go to another story in the news media that I think is of interest to, you know, to many of us who follow media here in the United States. But I think it has worldwide repercussions as well. This relates to a well known TV personality, Dr. Phil. Let's bring Dr. Phil up here. We don't have him live in the studio, but just so you get a sense of what we're talking about, Dr. Phil's media company, Merritt Street Media has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is suing its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network for or breach of contract. Merit street launched in early 2024 with McGraw's talk show as its flagship. The bankruptcy filing cites a severely strained liquidity position and failure to secure outside capital. It also references unpaid rights, fees to the professional bull riders and legal disputes with Trinity. Dr. Phil reportedly invested heavily through his own production company, but the network never reached profitability. It gained attention early this year for airing ICE raids and promoting Trump aligned immigration policy. Once among TV's highest paid personalities, earning $95 million in 2017, Dr. Phil's latest venture struggled and allegations of mismanagement, internal disputes and declining ratings. Trinity is a Christian broadcaster. It's accused of self dealing, overcharging for studio space and failing to honor national distribution commitments. Dr. Phil has not announced whether he will continue the show independently. So that's what's going on with Dr. Phil right now. Now, this surprises people at several levels because Dr. Phil had his own show for a couple of decades, made an absolute fortune. As I just reported to you there, he made an incredible amount of money in just one year. He made $95 million in 2017 alone. Some independent estimates regarding his net worth put it at half a billion dollars. He has near universal name recognition in the United States. It is fairly well known in other countries, too. And he can't make a new TV network work. What does this really mean? Well, what it does mean in part is what worked for you before isn't necessarily going to work for you in the future. What got you here won't get you to the next step. I'm starting to sound like Dr. Phil there. If you get too cocky, you can fail and you can fail miserably. Now let's not pass the tin cup around for Dr. Phil. I think all of his meals are paid for, his houses are paid for, his mortgage is paid for, his mansions across many states, including Beverly Hills are paid for. I don't think we have to worry about him. But what are the bigger lessons here? I do think that the media business is in a period of tremendous change, constant change. You see so many media businesses that you would have thought they'll last forever gone out of business every single day. Somewhere in America and the rest of the world, newspapers go out of business. But these days, it's not just a 200 year newspaper that goes out of business. It could be a website that was started 25 years ago is now out of it. It could be a website that was started 12 years ago with private equity, got too much overhead and they went bust. Dr. Phil is known for wanting to do things big Time and, you know, riding around a golf cart on his set because he didn't want to walk around or can't walk around very easily, the limousine services. And that just doesn't necessarily work in the new media environment where keeping your costs low is really a lot more of the way to success. The bigger issue to me, as I try to analyze Dr. Phil's bankruptcy here, is why did he want to go so deep into the traditional distribution? I understand people like to do what got them their success in the first point. He's used to being seen on a television, so he wanted to be distributed through cable TV networks. He was on broadcast tv. He said, okay, I'll get one step down cable tv. But unfortunately he's doing that in a time when cable TVs audiences are disintegrating. They're just melting away into almost nothing. Where our audience is going, well, they go in right here. I don't mean to my show, the community in particular, although I certainly hope so. Audiences are going to online and everything. Everything is online these days. It's not just your cell phone, it's not just your iPad, it's not just your desktop, it's not just your laptop. Increasingly, people are watching YouTube, sitting back in their living room looking at their television. That's the amazing thing. And we do see other traditional broadcasters like a Piers Morgan, getting that. Piers Morgan said, hey, I'm quitting working for a big TV network and I'm just going to go on YouTube and podcast and do things like substack. And for the life of me, other than ego, I don't know why Dr. Phil didn't embrace that same way of doing things. I mean, it's worked for Glenn Beck, a former TV star on the Fox News Channel who seems to put together a pretty nice empire with what he's doing online. The disgraced right wing pundit and talk show host from Fox, the former PrimeTime guy, Bill O'Reilly, has done very well. He just broadcasts from his own home, right on YouTube, right on podcast, continues to write books, continues to write newsletters, continues to publish on his website, makes millions of dollars. Perhaps Dr. Phil thought there's still a chance to have this giant, giant footprint on cable TV being everywhere and getting to the point where people can just sit in their home, turn their regular TV channel, click her on and see you. Maybe it was just too much of a hit to his ego. And let's face it, if you're a talk show host, broadcast talk shows making $95 million a year, you got a Pretty good size ego. You got a Texas size ego, since that's where Dr. Phil is from. And there's nothing wrong with having a big ego. But if you have a big ego, typically you don't like to go bankrupt. Although certain someone, orange, someone in Washington D.C. didn't seem to mind going bankrupt. One, two, three, four, at least four times. So what does this mean for Dr. Phil? I think it's a humbling experience. And hey, I've had humbling experiences. We all have. And I think it's yet another sign that the future of the media is really going to be more things like starting your own substack, starting your own YouTube channel, starting your own podcast, keeping overhead lean. You know, if you have a media business and it's making $1.2 million a year and you got a staff of 20 and a huge giant studio, well, guess what, you're going to be bankrupt. If you have a media company is making $1.2 million a year and you're doing it from a home or a small office, and it's you and maybe one assistant, well, guess what, you're the top 1% income. You're doing pretty well now. Maybe making an extra million dollars a year for someone like Dr. Phil at this point seems like pocket change. I don't know. But at some point, if you want to communicate, if you want to share your ideas with the world, you got to figure out a way where you're not losing money. Unless you want to see your entire fortune frittered away or unless you have some big foundation supporting you, it's not fun to create media, try to share it with the world, and have these roadblocks. Strikes me that Dr. Phil is still playing the old game of, hey, I'm a big shot. I can use my credentials to get through gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers are the way to the bigger audience. That's an old world way of thinking. The new way is, frankly, the Joe Rogan way. And I'm not endorsing everything Joe Rogan does or says, but it's just start your own thing. The Tim Ferriss way. He just said, I'm going to do an experiment. He did this 10 years ago. I'm just going to try this podcasting thing. Get a cheap microphone, get a laptop, start talking to people. And from there, he grew into something that generated in billions of listens to his podcast that I end with very, very, very lean. Almost no overhead to begin with. That, I think, is the model for you. It's the model for me. Stop wasting your time trying to go to gatekeepers. Stop spending. I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I'm going to go ahead and say it. Stop spending a lot of money on PR firms and PR people. And some of them are my best friends saying, oh, just get me on the Today show. Just get me on the CBS Evening News and I'll become rich and famous. Now, if you want to talk to millions of people, start putting out your own content on your own media, your own website, your own YouTube channel, and I understand YouTube owns it, but you can have your own channel, your own Facebook page, your own substack where you do control the data. Start the hard work of building an audience one at a time. Dr. Phil thought he could essentially shortchange things, speed it up by getting out all these homes on TVs through these distribution deals. Then he found out, wow, it only takes one gatekeeper. I'm on vacation. We're going to do things next quarter. Let's wait for more advertising. And he shut off. That doesn't happen when you build your own audience through social media and using the latest technologies available. Cable technology is now 50 years old. It's just not a new technology. And the gatekeepers there don't really have Internet any power. Dr. Phil, I'm sure he'll be around at some level. This company may go bankrupt. Maybe he will start a leaner, cleaner, simpler business model just working from his home. I don't know. He does have a gift for connecting with people, for attracting an audience, for stirring up controversy. So I'm not predicting by any means that this is the last we see of Dr. Phil, but it may be the last we see of this particular iteration of his business. Business is so called merit Media. Okay, we are going to switch over, switch gears and talk about some politics right now. Interesting, interesting week and political developments. Zoran Mandani won the New York City primary for the Democratic nomination. Let's hop in and let me give you an update on what's going on there. And then I will actually show you some of how this guy communicates, because I'm not here to tell you you should love him or you should have voted for him. I am here to tell you he's a good communicator. And regardless of where you are, the political spectrum, far right, far left, centrist, liberty, it doesn't matter where you are. There are certain lessons to be learned from a communications perspective on this guy. So quick news update. Zoran Magdani has decisively won the Democratic primary for mayor for New York city, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo by 12 points. The 33 year old Democratic socialist wrote a wave. And by the way, that's how he describes himself, a Democratic socialist. He wrote a wave of progressive momentum, union support and strategic ranked choice voting. Cuomo, once the front runner, ran a low energy campaign that critics say felt out of touch with today's electorate. Mandani's win has sparked debate across the Democratic Party. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Governor Kathy Hochul praised the campaign's energy but withheld endorsements, signaling internal divisions. Mamdani faces a challenging general election against incumbent Eric Adams, now running as an independent after federal bribery charges against him were dismissed under politically suspicious circumstances. Mamdani has drawn both praise and concern for his positions on Gaza, at first declining to condemn phrases like globalize the info tada. He's championed higher taxes on the wealthy and expansive new public programs. His victory could reshape the Democratic strategy in urban politics as well as other races, congressional races, swing districts around the country. Let's take a look at how this guy actually talks because I do think there are a lot of learning lessons here I want to share with you. This is directly from the candidate himself and you should know. He was really known for his ability to use clever social media videos throughout the entire campaign. So let's listen to this guy and see what he's up to.

One week ago we shocked the establishment and redrew the political map with a campaign relentlessly focused on the needs of working people. Since then, a lot of people have asked me if I was surprised by the results. In some ways I was. We always thought our victory would come after multiple rounds of ranked choice voting. So when we got more first round votes than Eric Adams got in seven rounds in the last election, it was astonishing. But in other ways, this was always the plan. We wanted to rebuild a coalition that had frayed over years of disappointment and neglect to win people back to a Democratic party that puts working people first.

So really articulate and comfortable in front of the camera, confident. Now, he typically always wore a suit. He's only 33 years old, so he typically in all of his social media videos and ads, or a suit and a tie, or at least a suit. He wasn't. He didn't want to look overly young, like a kid with a T shirt. But quick cuts. He's walking, he's moving, he's showing himself out with the people. Let's listen to how he comes across more now. He was Born in India to, excuse me, in Africa, to parents who were from India. So he's not quite Christian, he's Muslim. That's a little different from most politicians in America. Born in Africa, that's a little different. Indian parents, a little different. So he is unique in many levels. Let's watch more of what he has to say here.

So let's break it down. Last November, New York City saw some of the biggest shifts towards Donald Trump of anywhere in the country. Much of it took place in working class and immigrant neighborhoods. A few days after the election, we went to Hillside Avenue in Queensland, Fordham wrote in the Bronx, not to lecture, but to listen and what we heard.

So he got a lot of positive attention for this. Just walking around listening to people, interviewing them about why they voted for Trump and what they were looking for in a political party. So let's watch more of what he's doing.

There was a desire to bring down the cost of living. That was our focus. And many of those voters came back. Brighton beach went for Trump by 44 points last week. We won it by 16. College point was a plus 11. Trump neighborhood, we took it by eight points. We saw similar or even bigger swings in Bath Beach, Astoria Heights and the North Shore of Staten Island. The headline is clear. We can win back voters. Many have written off if we give them something to vote for, not just tell them what to be against. When Eric Adams eked out a win by 7,000 votes four years ago, he called it a mandate and pronounced himself the new face of the Democratic Party.

So this is some clever messaging here. He's hitting on this whole idea that I do think has a lot of widespread acceptance that American politics is so negative, so negative, so negative. There is a lot of truth to that. And he's saying people want some positive solution. To his credit, he did run a very positive campaign. Talking about his one issue, more about that in just a moment.

Even then it was a little ridiculous. But in some neighborhoods he did put up.

Now, did you see that smile? He looks like a friendly guy. I'm not saying he's your friend again, I'm not asking you to vote for him. But I want you to analyze how comfortable he seems on camera. Now, this is in contrast to the former governor who was running for mayor, Cuomo, who did everything more the traditional way. Everything's buttoned up, vetted press released, lawyers looking at it, traditional 30 second TV ads. This character, and I mean that dismissively, this interesting person did a lot of social media videos sharing it and spent dramatically Less money in the way he campaigned doing things with simple video like this. I mean, I'm assuming this was probably shot with a cell phone and moving. Most of his social media videos were.

Put up impressive margins. Take Flatbush for example. Eric Adams dominated there double digits ahead of his next rival. On Tuesday there was also a double digit victory, except it was for us over Andrew Cuomo. We flipped Crown Heights by 40.

I should point out that this video is after the election when a lot of Democrats who would normally coalesce around the nominee and endorse the nominee were very skittish and I'll get into those reasons in a moment. They did not embrace him. So he's sort of making the case. His message here appears to be more the mainstream Democratic establishment, centrist, right of center political leaders and showing them proof in a very analytical numerical way of where he made Progress with voters.

35 points, North Corona by 33 and Jamaica by a staggering 57 points. These are the outer borough voters.

So he's certainly coming across as very literate with numbers, with data, with complexity. He's certainly coming across as highly articulate and intelligent, educated. Many tried to dismiss himself. He's a kid, he's 33 years old and he's never run anything. He's starting to build the argument against that train of thought, that line of.

Attack Eric Adams said he'd bring with.

Him to City Hall.

He served as donors instead. Whether we're talking about young voters, older voters or just plain disaffected New Yorkers, no campaign in recent history has been a successful so note.

He's not in some slick studio, he's out in the streets, he's in public parks. He's very much showing he is a man of the people at driving new.

Voter registrations, especially in the hundred days before the election. Just take a look at this graph. According to the times, in the 14 days before the registration deadline, about 37,000 people registered to vote. That's over 10 times the number of new registrations over the same period of time in the 2021 mayoral primary.

So again, you may think that someone of his labels, and he does label himself a Democratic socialist, is not the best thing for the party. You can, you're certainly welcome to that and I will delve into that in just a moment. But he's making a very compelling analytical numerical analysis of why what he did was extraordinarily impressive and is a message to Democrats across the country. New York City is the largest city in the North America in the United States. It's the media center, it's the financial center, at least according to New Yorkers, and I was one for 20 years. It's the most important city in the entire world. Now that's obviously a subjective thing, but it's a big deal. And being the mayor of New York City is in some ways considered to be the second most powerful, second most difficult job in the United States, if not the world. Only after the presidency. Again, I understand those of you listening in other countries will think this is very self centered and guilty as charged, but it's a big deal. And anyone who's the mayor of New York City is typically automatically considered at least a potential presidential candidate and is a de facto leader, national leader of the Democratic Party. So he's attempting to make the case that he is effectively already, based on what he did in the primary, a leader of the Democratic Party. Let's see what else he has to say.

As a result, we won big with zero prime voters, New Yorkers who had not voted in any recent mayoral planet, for instance.

So talking about we're winning big with people who haven't new voters, we people haven't voted before. Every single Democrat official, Democratic official, one step centrist one. People in swing districts, people in conservative districts who've won by two votes. Everyone's looking for new voters. So whether you like him or not, if you care at all about the Democratic Party, you have to kind of listen. Oh, how did he do that? Let's listen more.

Since in Gravesend, at least 32% of all voters were first time primary voters, most campaigns focus on.

So 32% of voters are first time primary voters. I don't know how you can spin that in any negative way. I mean, that's the fantasy of every political party, every political candidate, triple front.

New Yorkers who voted in the last three primaries. But this strategy ignores most of our city, yet we knew that we could turn them out if they saw themselves in our policies. We ran a campaign that tried.

Also note just how clearly he speaks. He does not sound like he's reading a teleprompter. He doesn't sound like he's reading a cue card. He does sound like he's just sharing the most important ideas he'd like to share with you right now. All great speakers do that across the political spectrum, but he's coming across in a very genuine way. And he sounds like he's talking to one person. His opponent, former Governor Cuomo, has a great voice, but he has a more centurion and a More classical voice. It's a powerful voice, but he sounds like he's speaking to a bunch of people, a big room of people. This guy sounds like he's just talking to one other person on the other side of the park, Ben Bench. I think that's a part of his appeal. And believe me, if you're saying, well, TJ Sounds like he's in the tank for this guy, I'm going to give you both sides in just a moment.

I can talk to every New Yorker, whether I could speak their language.

Or.

Just try all the words.

So he is someone who knows a bunch of languages and isn't afraid to show it and try. People like that, voters like it when you speak their language.

They're new. And the coalition that came out on.

Tuesday and not afraid, as you just saw right there, to show himself being a little bit goofy and silly and making mistakes. So it's youthful without seeming to be juvenile or immature.

Reflected the mosaic of these five boroughs. We won South Asian neighborhoods by huge margins. In places like City Line, Ozone Park, Jamaica Hills. We won Latino neighborhoods like Corona, Washington Heights, Pelham Bay and Woodhaven. We won many of the same.

So he really seems conversing. He seems like he knows New York City like the back of his hand. He mentioned Ozone Park. Fun fact. I once lived there quarter of a century ago, right underneath the airplanes flying into Kennedy Airport. It was basically at the time a slum, really, just in earlier stages of my career during some downtime with my own media failures. Talking about Dr. Phil earlier. But he really seems like he knows every single neighborhood. The problem with some candidates in New York City is they seem like they only know Manhattan because that's where the rich people are. That's where the most exciting things are. That's where Wall street is. This guy is certainly conveying the sense that he's conversant. I mean, just even looking at the image there, there he is with graffiti in the background, that certainly there is some graffiti in Manhattan, but it looks more like an outer borough area. And that's part of what makes him connect with voters.

Same Chinese voters that turned out for Trump, Flushing, Chinatown and Bensonville. And in the final months of the campaign, we narrowed Andrew Cuomo's one sizable lead with black voters outright winning young black New Yorkers in neighborhoods like Harlem and Flatbush.

Now, that was interesting because it was completely different angle. I mean, that was almost more theater theatrical of what you would see in a movie with looking above and him looking up. Interesting. I don't think they hired a big movie crane for that, though, Andrew Cuomo.

And his super PAC spent more than $31 million. That's about $87 per vote. We were focused on affordability, and it cost us only 19 bucks per vote. But what you.

So this is clever, too, because talking about the dollars per vote, he seemed like a numbers guy. He seems like someone who's very numerate and comfortable with numbers, because that's one of the concerns people had, is how can a guy who's never really managed any big business or big office manage something as vast as the New York City bureaucracy, who did for us was.

Worth so much more than what money could buy. The result? We shattered everyone's expectations.

Here's the other thing that I think is often dismissed in politics. He seems happy. And I realize in recent times you can point to someone in the White House currently in other places who just seem angry all the time. Being really angry can work. There's no doubt about it. But you know what else can work? Being happy, Being optimistic, being positive. In that way, he's really kind of more like a Bill Clinton from 30 years ago, which, when you saw Bill Clinton campaigning, always a smile on his face. I'm not being partisan here. Let's go back 45 years ago to Ronald Reagan's campaign. Always had a smile on his face. Genial. Am I saying this guy is exactly like Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton and has the same career trajectory? No, I'm not making that prediction yet. But I am saying there's something about being positive, looking like you're happy, campaigning, having a smile on your face, that is infectious. And he's doing a great job here, including our own.

The Cuomo spokesperson put it best, saying they had not foreseen our ability to, quote, expand the electorate in such a way that no turnout model or poll was able to capture conventional wisdom says the left can only win.

So clever of him, quoting his opponents, giving, bolstering his argument. He is showing that he's not just someone who is screaming leftist diatribes, which is how he's been caricaturized. He is speaking to people that if they are a centrist, if they're mainstream, if they are really anywhere from far left to moderate right. There's nothing he said so far that would strike anyone as crazy or wildly ideological in any way. He's coming across as extraordinarily rational. Now, again, we'll talk about his policies in a moment, and you can make a case that some of his policies aren't completely rational, but so far, you can see him speaking in extraordinarily clear, understandable manner.

Low turnout elections. We rewrote the rulebook by, get this, talking to New Yorkers. Politics in this city won't ever be the same. And it's all thanks to you. The next chapter begins today. New York.

So what I just. And I watched that to the TJ Walker Success podcast for the first time with you, and I could tell you I'm extraordinarily impressed with his ability to communicate. But I promised you, I'm going to give it to you straight. And I'm now going to tell you some things, that regardless of where you are in the political spectrum, you're not going to like me. Okay? Now, I've already talked about some of the positives. Let me further isolate what I think he did well in this campaign. For starters, he focused on one issue. The problem most candidates have is they want to talk about 10 things, 100 things, a million policies. They want to get sucked into debates, they want to win debates, they want to win arguments. He narrowed in on this issue of affordability. You could make the case that President Trump did a lot of the same thing in the presidential election. Just saying, hey, inflation's too high. It's the people in charge. It happened under their watch. Time for somebody new. Now, he talked about a lot of other things, but inflation is about the cost of living. And in a place like New York, affordability is a big, big issue. Having lived there, I can tell you it's an extraordinarily expensive place, certainly the most expensive place in the United States. When you factor in every kind of tax and the cost of housing and food and restaurants and everything else. So he really focused on that. He then gave proposal after proposal of how he would try to fix it. Now, you could argue that it was aspirational, saying, oh, I'm going to make housing costs better for everyone by putting in a rent freeze. Most economists, and I agree with this assessment, say if you just freeze rents, you're going to reduce the supply of housing, because no developer is going to want to build if they can't ever raise rents and it's not profitable. So long term, you actually make it worse and you help old people who've been there for 20 or 30 years or inherit apartments from their parents. You can make housing a lot worse. Far better to have a housing policy like they do, frankly, in Texas and parts of Florida where anyone can build anywhere, any of the time, but there's so much stock available of housing, it gives Prices low. But he hit something that resonates with a lot of tenants. People who pay rent in New York City. They like hearing that he said he was going to make busing buses free. He said he was going to bring grocery stores. Well, people like stuff. I'm not saying that in a negative way. It's no different than politicians and other parties who say, I'm going to cut your taxes and reduce the deficit. Well, truth be told, nobody's done that in 50 years. Nobody's cut your taxes and reduced the deficit. Some have cut taxes, deficits have gone up. Some have reduced deficits, as President Clinton did, But some taxes on the wealthy went up. You can't have both. So you can make the case that what he's saying can't really be implemented. You could certainly make that case of anyone who's won big elections lately in America. Americans like to be lied to. I know that's not a politically correct thing to say. That's not going to get me votes. I'm not running for office. I'm here to tell you the straight truth, and I'm telling you Americans like to be lied to. They like to be told, we don't need to raise taxes. We're just going to get rid of government waste and everything will be fine. Funny how no one ever actually finds government waste. And I'm certainly not suggesting that there is no government waste, but there isn't any government waste that doesn't have a strong constituency of actual voters who will fight to the death to keep that spending exactly where it is. So what this candidate did so successfully is he focused on one problem that people have. They think New York City is not affordable. So he didn't spend a lot of time talking about who goes to what bathroom. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about who can swim on what college swimming team. He didn't get sucked into all these other issues. He focused. He had laser like focus on one issue, and he pounded it away with social media, with interviews, with speeches. That's what winning candidates do. That's what great candidates do. And that is something, I think Democratic candidates across the United States, and frankly, anyone who wants to win in any culture needs to internalize it if you want to win in elections. It's hard to get people's attention with 10 billion websites and tiktoks and tweets coming in every second of the day. So you got to focus on one issue at a time. And if you can get people to focus on just one thing in the Context of a six month or year long campaign. You're doing really well. And he did that well. Next he offered solutions. And whether you want to call them lies or you want to call them aspirational, I'll leave that up to you. He did talk about raising taxes on wealthier New York City people, which he can't do really without the New York City legislature, excuse me, the New York State legislature approving it. They said they're not going to do it. He can't really impose rent control because there are rent control boards that do that. He can't. There's a whole bunch of things he promised that he can't really do without approval from the state legislature. And I won't bore you with all the mechanics of interstate politics, but his proposals were all focused on one thing, trying to make life more affordable to the average New Yorker. And New York is a place of extremes. You have billion more billionaires per square inch there than any place else in the country. You know, a lot of people worth hundreds of millions, Wall street titans, but you have a lot more people who make 50,000 a year, 40,000, 30,000, 20,000 a year. And they are barely, barely hanging on. A lot more of them vote than the billionaires because the average billionaire who lives in New York city lives in 10 other cities and probably isn't domiciled in New York City for tax reasons. So he wasn't speaking to them. So overall, I'm going to give it to you straight, the positives and negatives. Now for the Democratic Party the part, the positives is this guy could clearly win the general election at this point. He's the hands down favorite because the incumbent Eric Adams has been disgraced in scandal. Didn't even bother running for the Democratic nomination this time. The Republican, Curtis Sliwa, a talk show host, I've debated him on talk shows before, is a complete clown. He's who a party picks when they can't find a serious candidate. So Mamdavi is really, that he has to really, really screw up to lose. Now New York City is different. There's all these different parties. Some billionaire could come in at the last minute and spend a lot of money. I don't know if that, that playbook works anymore the way it did in 2001 when Mayor Bloomberg ran and was essentially able to buy up all the TV time because there weren't selling any ads after 9 11. That was a rare situation, doesn't exist today. So the positives for this candidate he's shown be good at Social media, don't be someone like Joe Biden. And I hate to pick on poor Joe Biden anymore or Andrew Cuomo that just says commission a poll, hire a media consultant, do some ads and let me stay in my bedroom and make phone calls to billionaires for money. That model might still work for some people, but it's not going to be the winning model for most Democratic candidates in most elections that I'm quite confident of. So I'm. Donnie has shown that that's not the model. You got to be good at social media, you got to be communicating, you got to be listening, you got to be out with people. You got to focus on one issue. And I think whether it's affordability in the case of New York City or where you are, it has to be on economic matters. If it's on cultural matters, it's too easy for another party to get people angry about, oh, immigrants are taking over and people of a different religion are bad and foreigners are bad and transsexuals are bad and homosexuals are bad. It's too easy to stir up hatreds in a way that, that favor the right. Some of you may disagree with that. That's okay. You can post your comment and disagree, but that's really the problem. And Democrats have historically done a horrible job of getting people to focus on pure economic issues. They get sucked into debates about, you know, who's against burning the flag. And once that starts, it's really easy to lose who looks stupid wearing a helmet and a tank. When issues like that start, the Democrats typically lose. So I think this guy's a great role model in that regard. Also, just the fact that he's young. Right now we have someone in the White House who, if he does serve to the end of a term of when a the term normally ends, will be the oldest president in the history of our country. The president who just stepped out was the oldest president in the history of this country. A lot of people are frankly sick and tired of politicians who are 150 years old. The fact that this guy is 33 and potentially the second most powerful person in the country, I do think sends a message that at least one party is open to young new leadership. Now, in fairness to the Republicans, their vice president is only a few years older than this guy. He's only about 40 years old. So I don't want to make it sound like it's completely one sided. So that's in his favor. Now I'm going to get to the parts some of you hate me if you're Republican or conservative, you're saying, well, TJ is shilling for this guy. Now all the Democrats are going to hate me with what I had to say. The biggest downside I see to Mandani is not his position on Gaza. And he does differ from what AIPAC and a lot of leading Jewish organizations prefer candidates to say in America. I don't think that's his biggest problem. I think the biggest problem by far is his embrace of, of the word socialist. Now he calls himself a democratic socialist. A little context here. If you believe in public schools, you're a socialist. A public school is socializing education where everybody pays, everybody benefits, or everybody who has kids who want to send their kids to public school benefits. So don't get too high and mighty and say, how dare you, dare anyone say anything good about socialism. If you've ever supported a public school, you're a socialist. If you've ever ridden on a highway, you're in favor of socialism. It's socializing the building of roads so that everyone can pay for it. If you've ever supported a local police force, you're a socialist in a sense because you're socializing the cost of that police force. Everyone pays, everyone benefits, although not equally. If you're assaulted or someone in your family's attacked or murdered, you're going to be spending a lot of time with police. You're going to be getting a disproportionate amount of services because it's been socialized. A lot of people don't realize Karl Marx was advocating public parks and public education in the Communist Manifesto at a time when that was not a popular idea. So for starters, you need to get off your high horse if you just bristle at the idea of calling anything socialist. Western Europe, Scandinavia, is filled with politicians who call themselves democratic socialist. And if you've ever been to those countries, they're fantastic. The quality of life is fantastic. They're capitalistic societies, rich societies. Now, with that throat clearing aside, let's get real in America, to large swaths of the electorate. I don't just mean people who consider themselves maga. I don't just mean people who consider themselves far right Republicans or libertarians. To gigantic swaths of America, you say the word socialist is the end of the discussion. Because they instantly think Fidel Castro and everyone driving around in a 1957 Chevy and starving to death and eating dirt and sticks three meals a day. That's what, rightly or wrongly, tens of millions of Americans believe. Or they think of Stalin, they think of, they think of Communist China. Not the good rich China today, but the China of wretched poverty and cultural revolution of decades ago where people lived in abject poverty. That's what they think of when they hear the word socialism. So I do think strategically it is a horrible, horrible thing for the Democratic Party. If they do have a mayor of the largest city in the country and he actually embraces the term socialist and you can say, well, time out. T.J. you're not being fair. He didn't say he was a socialist. He said it's a democratic socialist. Well, that's too cute by half. It's like saying, well, I'm not a pedophile, I'm a pedophile. Light. Well, if you say that, the only thing anyone's going to hear is pedophile. They're not going to hear the light part or adjacent or anything like that. It's an extraordinarily negatively charged word and I don't think any one candidate can change it. If Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates and 10 other billionaires say, we're going to rehabilitate the world, we're going to spend $10 billion a year running ads telling people why socialism is good, okay then it won't be a noose around the neck of candidates. But until then, it's such a weight, it's such a millstone around a candidate and it might not be hurting him in this case, but it is going to hurt the party. I can tell you the only organization, the only group of people I see more excited about Mondavi than progressives in New York City, Fox News and conservatives. I haven't seen Sean Hannity this happy since Bill Clinton got caught with an intern in the White House non stop all day long on Fox News since this election has happened, it's all they could talk about. Wow, the Democratic Party is now headed up by a socialist. Socialist, social. I mean, they're so good at branding. Regard. The right and the left and the center, I should say, in America are really very different in how they communicate. Centrists, liberals, progressives, and the tiny faction on the left are constantly talking about every single issue with complexity and nuance. The right and places like Fox News are constantly more strategic in their communication. They're constantly framing everything in terms of we're conservative. And conservative is good because it means more power to you, more liberty to you, more money for you, lower taxes, stronger defense. And liberals are bad because they're really socialist, which means 100% taxes. And you're going to starve to death and live under oppression like Fidel Castro. That message has been marketed 10,000 times a day for decades by American conservative media. And they're just, they're drooling. They're so happy about this. They're ecstatic talking about this Democratic socialist nominee for mayor of New York City. And already on record, the heads of the Republican congressional campaigns, Congressional Senate campaigns are saying essentially, this is the greatest thing that ever happened to us because we are going to tie this Democratic Socialist around to every conservative Democrat, centrist Democrat, mainstream Democrat running for office anywhere in America. We're going to make them have to defend socialism. They're so excited, they could barely contain themselves. And you know what? I think they have reason to be excited. I do think that this, in a sense, is their ultimate dream. Because I have seen in my adult life, back as a teenager, I have seen really conservative Democrats be labeled through consistent pounding away of message of, you're too liberal, you're too socialist, you're too social, you embrace socialism. We saw that here in Florida, where I'm based last year, where Joe Biden, who's been considered a conservative Democrat, or at least a moderate Democrat his entire life, was branded a socialist by many people here, and he lost the state in large part because of that message. So if I'm being fair, and I try to be fair with you right here, I think there are about 10 or 20 good things about Madani, the candidate and his candidacy and how he comports himself, and lessons that can be learned for Democrats and members of his party. 10 or 20 really positive things. I think there's one negative thing, unfortunately, and I hope I'm wrong. I think that one negative thing is so powerful it can undo all the other good things. Because of this charged word of socialism. It's. It's very difficult to just change overnight. A brand that has been marketed with billions of dollars of advertising dollars on a daily basis for decades. And that's what socialism. That's what's happened to the word socialism. It has been marketed and branded as the single worst form of public policy a society could adapt. Whether you agree with it or not, it is simply a fact that that is the public perception. Now you could say, well, T.J. you're old. That's how old people think. A lot of young people say, oh, socialism is great, fine, let's see how they vote in elections. Because certainly they do not turn out. I mean, I've seen predictions the last 20 years that young people are so much more liberal and progressive. They're going to win the day for the Democratic nominees and it hasn't happened certainly in the Senate and a lot of House races close race, it's just not happened. So that is my take on this candidate. We're going to be looking at him closely in the weeks to come, the months to come, because he is someone who is a compelling communicator. There's absolutely no doubt about it. And that's the whole premise of the communiverse here. We're looking at news as it relates to business, technology, culture and this is a part of our culture through the lens of communication. In order to boost your personal success, I want you to be successful. So learn the positive things about this candidate, but be very careful about embracing a brand label that is toxic to a lot of the people that you want to appeal to. Next up, let's check in on someone who no stranger to anyone who follows the news, I'm talking about, of course, Elon Musk. Elon Musk is threatening to launch a new political party if President Trump's signature tax and spending bill passes. And it did pass today. At the time of this recording, the proposed America Party he claims would represent the 80% in the middle of the political spectrum. On his social media platform X, Musk posted that if the insane spending bill passes, the American Party will be formed the next day. That would be tomorrow. As of this recording, a follow up poll drew 5.6 million votes on his Twitter post with 80% favoring a new party. Though unlikely to succeed in a two party system, Musk's influence, financing power and loyal following could disrupt key Republican races, especially by backing challengers or running independent spoiler candidates. Musk's fallout with Trump, including claims Trump appeared in Epstein related files, hasn't damaged his standing with many conservatives. Analysts warn that even a modest third party showing could swing tight races in 2026 or 2028. Whether it's a stunt or a serious threat, Musk move has rattled GOP leadership and added volatility to an already fractured political landscape. So that's the latest from Elon Musk. Now if anyone can start a third party, I'd say he's right up there in ability simply because his ability to write checks. A lot of politics happens with money, because starting a political party requires organizers, it requires media, it requires staff, it requires headquarters. If you want to do it right, it would take billions of dollars. And that's why typically when you hear some politician talk about this or some good government types, we need a third Party, you can dismiss it as complete nonsense. I don't write this off as complete nonsense simply because Elon Musk does have the power of the purse, and that's typically a phrase you associate with governments. But since his personal worth, at least at this moment, it hasn't been destroyed yet, although he seems to be doing a good job of reducing his. His vast fortune at this moment, he does have as much money as a lot of governments do. So you can't write him off. Here's the bigger challenge I see for Elon Musk is the people he's been appealing to the most are almost completely in favor of Donald Trump. There's no space between. He thinks that the hundreds of millions of people, 100 million or so, who voted for Trump are doing so because they wanted a balanced budget. That's complete nonsense. The last person to balance the budget was Bill Clinton. And every single person I know who said, I care about a balanced budget, they never voted for Bill Clinton. Because one party talks a good game about balancing budgets. Now, they do so typically only when a Democrat is in office. But the Republicans talk about fiscal conservatism and they talk about balancing budgets, and yet when they get in office, they spend more than anyone. George Bush raised the deficit more than anyone and the debt more than anyone in the history of the country until the first President Trump. And now the second President Trump has blown the deficit so high it's almost comical at this point if it weren't such a crisis. So if Elon Musk thinks people are going to join a party because they care so passionately about the deaths, I think he's sadly mistaken. It's kind of like the Never Trumpers, the former Republicans like Bill Kristol, who thought they would start this big mass movement of fighting Trump, opposing Trump, making sure he was written out of politics after 2020. How did that work? I mean, those people could have an annual convention in a phone booth in New York City. Phone booth for those of you. Well, we'll talk about that another time. They don't need a big convention hall because there's so few people who are active Republicans who don't like Trump anymore. That's why the Never Trumpers essentially died out and had no impact. I happen to believe that the number of people who already like Elon Musk, who care passionately about things like the debt, who would be willing to join a new party and vote against Donald Trump, is very small. I could be wrong. We'll find out if Musk is willing to spend enough Money on advertising and building out a party and essentially turning over his X platform to non stop doing propaganda for his new party, which he certainly might do, then all bets are off. He might be able to turn into it. Here's the thing people don't realize about political parties in America. They're already really weak. If you could just go to every precinct in America and have two people show up who believe in your platform, you could take over tomorrow like that. Any party, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, it would only take two people showing up in each precinct because when parties gather so few people show up. It really is just a handful of people who get to make decisions. And quite often you get elected to prominent positions simply because you didn't show up and people nominated you and you weren't there to say no. I've seen that happen personally, believe me. So it's not that hard to actually influence any either one of the Republican parties. Donald Trump, I guess to his credit, demonstrated that perfectly in 2016. He said this political party has traditionally stood for free trade, no tariffs, being anti gay marriage and anti homosexual rights, anti deficit, anti Social Security. And he said, you know what? I'm changing all of that. I'm going to come in here, be popular, get my people, talk about how awful other people are, get all the focus, get people angry and upset about immigrants and illegal aliens and these vermin and all these, all this and the borders, all that stuff. They're not going to notice what I do on tariffs and free trade and debt and any of that. And he was right, he did it. And he spent virtually none of his own money. So if Elon Musk wants to change a party to his own, parties are fairly malleable. Now you could argue at the current moment, Republican Party isn't quite as malleable because they have such a leader, cult leader, depending on your perspective, an iron grip on the party and hello to Selling man says. Nice to see you. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us today. We're doing a little experiment here with the Communiverse, a new show I'm doing. It's about business, tech and culture decoded through a communication lens to boost your success. That's what the show's about. We're looking at things in the news. So here's the real part and this is the reason I wanted to talk about it. Because it is a communications challenge, it's a messaging challenge for Musk or anyone else to start a political party. If you ask people, do you want a political new Political party. The default answer is going to be yes. It's like asking a kid, would you like to have 10 more choices of ice cream? Well, sure, everyone likes choice. But if you take the average kid and put them in an ice cream store with 10 more flavors, they're still going to pick the flavor they like. Their favorite flavor. I know I'm going to pick chocolate or some, you know, rocky road with peanuts and chocolate and peanut butter in it. I'm still going to pick kind of the same thing, even if you have 89 other flavors. So everyone is going to answer a poll saying, sure, let's have a new party. The problem is Musk is operating under a faulty assumption. He's operating under the assumption that one party is captured by the far right, another party is captured by the far left, and there's this gigantic middle ground. And that's easy to pick. Well, I'm here to tell you that's just not how it works in America. One party has decided and they've made a very shrewd, tactical decision that we're just simply going to call anybody who's not in our party. We're going to call all of our opponents extremists. And we're going to be very disciplined on message. We're going to say it again and again and again and again. And it doesn't matter that most of their candidates are in the center and are centrist. We're just going to say they're extremists. And you know what? It works. A little context. Many of our friends watching in Europe know this to be true, but a lot of Americans don't. In America, our political spectrum goes from right wing, far right. In fact, much farther right than most parties in Europe because conservative parties in Europe are not in favor of taking away health care from their, their native citizens. Most right wing parties in Europe and other places recognize there is something to global warming. They don't simply debate it or ignore it. Our right wing actually is far right. We have a far, far right wing in America. We have a center in America. We really, by the standards of European parliaments, parliaments, legislatures around the world, we really don't have a left. Yeah, I know there's a Bernie Sanders, there's aoc. You got two. Okay. There's no one that with power in the left in America we have a lot of centrists and moderates who are given the label of left. But their actual policies, if you look at them and come up with top 10 policies on taxation, environmental regulation, education, 80% of the country who call themselves centrist would agree with them. So the real problem Musk has is there's simply not this big, big ideological faction in the middle up for grabs. They're not. They're already picked off issue by issue. They may go back and forth on some, but they really aren't. And those who've tried have failed, typically. Now, that doesn't mean that if Musk started a party and he got, say, 9% of voters to back him and back some new party, that that couldn't completely change the history of this country, because it could completely change who gets to be the next president. If he gets 9% and it siphons off votes from Trump or Trump Jr. Or whoever Trump family puts up, it could easily swing the race of the Democrats, because now a Democrat could win with 42% of the vote. That's going to be pretty easy for a Democrat to get. So I don't discount the ability of someone like Musk starting a third party. But as far as it having a real lasting impact, I don't think there is any place in the marketplace of ideas ideologically for there to be someone. It's easy to say as a pundit, oh, I'm a centrist and I'm for this and this. Once you get down to the nitty gritty, that's just not how voters think, act, and reward politicians with their votes. So we'll be paying attention to this. If it's like a lot of things Musk says, he talks about something, makes a promise, and you never hear about it again, or he says he's going to do something tomorrow and it's 10 years later. No, he's done a lot of innovative things. He's a better innovator than I am. He's solved big problems. Electric vehicles, reusable spaceships, satellites. When he puts his focus on something, he can accomplish things that other people thought were impossible. Maybe this is one. But the question now is, what does he focus on? He's so scattered, he's so all over the place. And if you happen to believe, reporting from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, he's also focused on ketamine and doing drugs and partying. And he certainly, he certainly. When you see him at the White House with the baseball cap and long black coats, he does look like he's trying to audition to be a party promoter for nightclubs in Miami Beach. He doesn't seem like a serious person now. And this may be his best years are behind him. I Don't know. I'm not counting him out yet. But I personally think the messaging of a third party is really easy and simple for the first two seconds, oh, we need a centrist party. But when you get down to actually defining doesn't mean anything to anyone. And it turns out, you know, when you want to cut budgets, there's no easy waste, fraud and abuse. Musk found out that the hard way. So, oh, I found all these millions of people on Social Security roles getting paid. It's waste, fraud and abuse. And then they actually not any. That's just a misunderstanding of what's going on. And that is the problem when there becomes a cult of personality, whether it's Elon Musk or a certain orange fellow in D.C. when people stop questioning things and I just say, whatever. What is the ultimate bad that happens when people fall for a cult of personality? That leads us to our next story. Right now. It's nearly 50 years after the Jonestown massacre. The site in Guyana has opened to tourists, prompting a backlash from survivors and locals. More than 900 people died in 1978, a mass murder suicide orchestrated by cult leader Jim Jones. There's a new get this 750 Jonestown memorial tour. It includes a bush flight, a van ride and guided visits to the jungle clearing where the settlement once stood. Now survivors are calling this exploitation. One lost 11 family members, and they call the tour a money grab. There's a tour operator Rosalind Shircharan defends it as a way to educate future generations about manipulation and culture dynamics. The site includes a replica welcome sign and planned museum space. Critics argue the tour sensationalizes trauma. Defenders say it's no different than visiting Auschwitz or Ground Zero. The Guyanese government has distanced itself from the future, saying Jonestown was an American tragedy that occurred on its soil. That is true. He was an American evangelist, cult leader, and almost everyone there was a US Citizen. Reaction among locals ranged from curiosity to avoidance. Many say the area still carries a haunted energy. I don't know if this is going to be the number one destination for my next vacation. It doesn't look like a fun place. And I've spent time in South America, Central America, other places, but it doesn't seem like a lot of fun. And I don't know how much of the problem of this cult leader, if any of it, related to the particular location. It could have happened any. It could have happened in California, where he was based for most of his careers. I do think it is important to teach people, especially children, about the power of cult leaders about the danger of cult leaders, because that wasn't the last cult leader. There are cult leaders around us everywhere. Now, cult is one of these words where everyone has a different definition. And what you think is a cult, someone else may say, well, that's just a great nonprofit organization, or that's a great denomination or a great church. So you can define it a lot of different ways. Some would argue that all religions are cults. Others would say, you've got to really look at how rigid the level of control is. In this case, Jim Jones told people, you got to give me all your money, you got to give me your passport, and now you got to drink this and we're all going to die. Now, certainly your average religious leader of mainstream popular religions are not doing that to people. This went to an extreme level. 900 people dying, but it's a testament to the power of speaking. This guy rose to power because he was a great speaker. He gave compelling, electrifying speeches, sermons, what they called, and he was able to get people in the palm of his hand. Now, by all accounts, he preyed upon lost people, people down in their, down in life, people suffering depression, people in transition, runaways, but also wealthy people. And he got a lot of money that way, as most cult leaders do. So would I go to this Jonestown tourist tour if I happen to be in that country on business and I had a free day? Yeah, I might. I wouldn't. There's a certain amount of curiosity there and I've seen documentaries about him. I would urge you to check it out. And I would see him time to time. There's talk about big mainstream Hollywood star studded movies on this. I would watch a movie about this, this because I do think it is a another example of the power of communication, whether it's Jim Jones, whether it's Adolf Hitler. When you look at people who really developed huge cult followings, they're always great speakers. It might not be technically Oxford style debate speech skill they have, but they always connect with people emotionally in an extraordinarily powerful way. We're seeing that in America today with certain leaders, and I think you know who. So that's why I am in favor of not just forgetting about Jonestown, not just sweeping it under the rug. A museum. Yes. Turning it into a mini Disney World or something. That's, that's not something I would endorse. He's certainly not someone to be admired. But learning from cult leaders is a lesson more important today than ever. Okay, enough about the killing yourself how about going in the opposite direction and focusing on what actually makes you healthy? This is an item that struck me in the news about Weighted Vest Major Influencer Analysis in the New York Times Weighted vest have become a popular fitness trend, according to the New York Times, especially among women over 40 seeking to preserve bone density and muscle mass. But how effective are they? According to experts, the science is mixed. Some small studies show potential bone and strength benefits when vests are used during resistance or jumping exercises, but simply walking in one hasn't shown clear bone density improvements. The Bone Health and Osteoporosis foundation does not endorse weighted vests due to lack of strong evidence. Experts recommend starting with a vest that's 5 to 10% of your weight and combining it with strength training. Weighted vests can increase aerobic challenge and core activation, but won't replace full body resistance workouts. If they motivate you to move more, great. That's the consensus. But don't buy the influencer hype that they're a silver bullet for aging. Bottom line, safe if used properly. Potentially helpful, but not a magic fit. Okay, confession time. I have used weighted this. I bought one a few years ago and here's why. I like to walk. I don't like lifting weights. And don't worry, at the end of this, I'm not going to sell you a weighted vest. My thinking was I like to walk a lot. I don't like going to the gym and lifting weights. This could combine something I need with something I already like doing. So I bought one of these weighted vests where you fill it with water. So in theory it's portable. You can travel with it and you just fill it up with water. And it is an interesting experience because you are consciously having to use your core muscles more. A normal walk at a normal speed in a temperature, say 72 degrees. That would not result in me becoming sweaty. All of a sudden I'm sweaty. So I love theory. It's portable. You can travel with it and you just fill it up with water. And it is an interesting experience because you are consciously having to use your core muscles more. A normal walk at a normal speed in a temperature, say 72 degrees. That would not result in me becoming sweaty. All of a sudden I'm sweaty. So I like the fact that I did kind of a workout. Now, the downsides of a weighted vest, as I see it, I like the fact that I did kind of a workout. Now, the downsides of of a weighted vest, as I see it, you look ridiculous. People look at you like, if you got a bomb on, are you going to blow us all up? Are you a terrorist? It looks weird. It's very hot for me. It kind of removed the joy of walking. I like walking. I like going for a stroll. You look ridiculous. People look at you like, if you got a bomb on, are you going to blow us all up? Are you a terrorist? It looks weird. It's very hot for me. It kind of removed the joy of walking. I like walking. I like going for a stroll. I typically walk 15,000 steps a day, often 20,000 steps a day. And I just didn't enjoy was also quite cumbersome. If you're putting enough weight on to do much of a impact, it's uncomfortable putting it on and then you got to store it someplace. So for me, it it fit in. I typically walk 15,000 steps a day, often 20,000 steps a day into that category of an exercise gadget. I never bought a Suzanne Summers thigh mat and I just didn't enjoy was also quite cumbersome. If you're putting enough weight on to do much of a impact, it's uncomfortable putting it on. But the world is filled with junk in people's closets of exercise devices. They got that seemed like a good idea. An influencer, an ad and an infomercial told you about it. You try it once and whether it's one time or 30 days late and then you got to store it someplace. So for me, it it fit in or you put it in the closet and then two years later you threw it away. And I think that's probably what I did into that category of an exercise gadget. I never bought a Suzanne Summers thigh mat. So what's the real message here from a communication standpoint? Don't. One of them is don't buy stuff just because an influencer says, oh, look at this is cool. If you're an influencer and you're in the health space getting a product that can be I don't know what it was. 140 bucks is a nice thing because. But the world is filled with junk in people's closets of exercise devices. They got that seemed like a good idea. An influencer, an ad and infomercial told you about it, you can sell it. You get a decent Commission. You get 20 bucks, you could make some money. If you're an influencer and you just tell people, get off your seat and walk an extra 10,000 steps. You try it once and whether it's one time or 30 days later, walk 14,000 instead of 4,000, you can't make any money from that. So be very wary of products from social media influence either. You put it in the closet and then two years later you threw it away. And I think that's probably what I did. There's advertisers, product companies. We live in a culture where everyone, and I've been guilty of this, is looking for the quick fix. Where's the pill? Where's the shot? Where's that magic meditation tape? Where's that one device? I mean, at one point, I bought a device where it shakes you like this, and you just stand on it long enough and it shakes. You're having to use your mouse. So what's the real message here? From a communication standpoint, one of them is, don't buy stuff just because an influencer says, oh, look at. This is cool. If you're an influencer and you're in the health space, getting a product that can be. I don't know what it was. 140 bucks is a nice thing because to keep your balance, here's the truth about all these devices. They all work, except they're so boring or stupid. You feel so stupid. Nobody ever uses them after a month, and it just collects dust in your closet. Now, I say nobody. I'm sure somebody does, but it's such a rare thing. I mean, that's the problem with treadmill. You can sell it. You get a decent Commission. You get 20 bucks, you could make some money. If you're an influencer and you just tell people, get off your seat and walk an extra 20, 10,000 steps today, walk 14,000 instead of 4,000. You can't make any money from that, so be very now. I happen to use a treadmill virtually every single day if I don't run outside. But I'm not using a treadmill because I thought, oh, if I buy a treadmill, I'll run. No, I decided as a part of my health, my commitment to my own body, my own potential longevity, I'm going to run for 20 minutes a day. I try to do it outside and get the fresh air because I happen to think the research shows that's the healthiest thing for me. Getting some sun, getting some fresh air, getting away from this. I'm holding up my cell phone for those of you listening, wary of products from social media, influencer on the podcast. And I use a treadmill because it helps me with a habit I've already formed. Now, I've had treadmills before. When I had a home gym, there's advertisers, product companies. We live in a culture where everyone. And I've been dealing. Now I use other outside gyms that are close by. So I'm not anti treadmill, but if you, if you hate running and you never ever run, you think, wow, I'm 40 pounds overweight. If I just got a fancy expensive treadmill that would motivate me to exercise more. You're fooling yourself. You're looking at a very expensive laundry rack because that's how most people use their. This is looking for the quick fix. Where's the pill? Where's the shot? Where's that magic meditation tape? Where's that one device? I mean, at one point I bought a device where it shakes you like this and you just stand on it long enough and it shakes. You're having to use your muscle treadmills. So here's the trouble here. I'm a huge student of longevity, healthy living, healthy habits, tools to keep your balance. Here's the truth about all these devices. They all work. And here's my challenge. Yes, there are occasional tools that can be very helpful. There are health hacks that can help you. I mean, I've, I've got over here juggling balls because I find juggling every day stimulates my brain. It makes me feel young bark. Except they're so boring or stupid. You feel so stupid. Nobody ever uses them after a month and it just collects dust. What am I saying? You need to buy juggling balls. No, there are certain. I mean, I have dumbbells, but I use them every day. I don't use them as door stops. You got to pick something that you are willing to use. The big problem we all face as human beings in your closet. I say nobody. I'm sure somebody does. But it's such a rare thing. I mean, that's the problem with treadmill is we're bombarded with communication all day long saying buy this product is the easy way to lose. Now I happen to use a treadmill virtually every single day if I don't run outside. Buy this product. It's the easy way to exercise. Buy this weight and buy this product, this potion, this supplement and you're going to get ripped. Strong muscles and no downside. And they're all lies for the most part. If you want to be healthier, it really comes down to focus on three areas. Eat real food. But I'm not using a treadmill because I thought, oh, if I buy a treadmill, I'll run. No, I decided as a part of my health, my commitment to my own body, my own potential longevity. Not processed garbage filled with sugar and processed carbohydrates and processed fat and added flavoring. Easy for me to say, hard to do in real life. I understand that. The second thing deals with exercise more, move more. I don't mean good. I'm gonna run for 20 minutes a day. I try to do it outside and get the fresh air because I don't get expensive gym memberships. Move more. Simply walk more, get off the bus or the site. Happen to think the research shows that's the healthiest thing for me. Getting some sun, getting up way one stop early and walk that extra 10 blocks. That's so much better for your health than buying a gym membership that you never use or buying some supplement filled with God knows what. Because people can put anything they want. They can put sawdust and dog poop and a supplement and you wouldn't Some fresh air. Getting away from this. I'm holding up my cell phone for those of you listening on the podcast and I use a treadmill because it know and they can get away with it most of the time. The third thing, it's not sexy to talk. It helps me with a habit I've already formed. Now I've had treadmills before when I had a home gym about this sleep. If you're staring at your cell phone at 10 o' clock at night and you need to get up at 6am to get to work or get to school, you basically destroyed your health right there. If you're looking at your cell phone to 10, you're probably not going to fall asleep till 11. You're not going to get Now I use other outside gyms that are close by so I'm not anti treadmill but if you let's get a night of sleep you're guaranteed you didn't get your eight hours sleep. So so much of the secret to health really comes down to getting better sleep. Which you can do primarily by turning off your phone on all screens and going to bed earlier, eating real food and not drinking sugar all day long. I'm drinking green tea here with no sugar. If you hate running and you never ever run, you think wow, I'm 40 pounds overweight. If I just got a fancy expensive treadmill that would motivate me to exercise more. You're fooling yourself. You're looking at a cream in it. I'm drinking water here, not water with all sorts of Coca cola sugar flavoring in it and moving more. That's what it comes down to. But it's very hard to make money. If I'm an influencer, I can't make money selling you those three things because they very expensive laundry rack, because that's how most people use their cost. Essentially nothing. Now you could say, well, tj, you know, getting whole foods and organic vegetables, treadmills. So here's the trouble here. I'm a huge fresh food that cost a lot. You know what doesn't cost a lot? Filtered tap water. Instead of coke and Sprite and Mellow Yellow and beer. You actually save money. So you can't simply use that excuse that it cost a lot of money to be healthy. So that's a little bit of a rant on these weighted vests. I would suggest if you have a friend or you're at a store and they let you try one, try it a few days. I mean, if you really did use it on a regular basis, it could be great. It could be a nice extra thing for you. But nothing beats actually lifting weights. Do I like lifting weights? No. But I try to do it every day and typically do it at least five days a week. Because there's lots of evidence, this thing called evidence, that it does build muscles, it does make you stronger, it does decrease the chances of getting long term chronic diseases that could kill you. And that's why lifting weights is so important. Okay, let's go from important to what really isn't important at one level, but could be student of longevity, healthy living, healthy habits. And here's my challenge. Yes, there are occasional tools that can be very helpful. There are health hacks that can help you. I mean, I've got over here juggling balls. Because I find juggling every day stimulates my brain. It makes me feel young. But am I saying you need to buy juggling balls? No, there are certain. I mean, I have dumbbells, but I use the sign of apocalypse depending upon your perspective. Okay, what am I talking about right here? I'm a little reluctant to even bring up this topic, but them every day. I don't use them as door stops. You got to pick something that you are willing to to use the big problem we all face as human beings. Wow, wow, wow. Just take a look at this headline. Now, some of you may have missed this in the news and thought, tj, why are you showing a headline from the Onion or from satirical news magazines? Believe it or not, this is not is. We're bombarded with communication all day long saying, buy this product is the easy way to lose satire. This is actual, actual news. Let me give you the poop here. President Trump has launched a new fragrance line called Victory 45 40s weight. Buy this product. It's the easy way to exercise. Buy this weight and buy this product, this potion, this supplement, and you're going to get ripped. Strong muscles and no downside. And they're all lies for the most part. If you want to be seven. Referencing his dual presidential terms, each 3.3 ounce bottle will cost $250 and features a gold statute of Trump himself. The men's scent is described as Woody, an office safe with amber and cardamom notes. The woman's version includes vanilla healthier. It really comes down to focus on three areas. Eat real food, gardenia and a hint of strawberry. Reviewers say both are pleasant but generic. The fragrance joins Trump's branded merchandise empire, which includes sneakers, watches, cell phones and trading cards. Licensing deals bring in over $7 million annually. Critics say the perfume is overpriced and lacks originality. Typically not processed garbage filled with sugar and processed carbohydrates and processed fat and added flavoring. Easy for me to say, hard to do in real life. I understand that. The second thing deals with exercise more, move more. I don't mean Google of celebrity fragrance lines designed for loyalty fans, not connoisseurs. This is Trump's second foray into perfume. In 2012, he released Success. Asked then what it smelled like, he said, I can't say sweetness. I would say it has a good scent. So here's what's really it does. It's no get expensive gym memberships. Move more. Simply walk more. Get off the bus or the set about whether this is a good scent or not a good sin. What this is about, let me lay it out. Subway one stop early and walk that extra 10 blocks. That's so much better for your health than what I think. The real message is being communicated here. It's this current administration say here was a line, I'm scratching it off and I'm moving the line here. Every day we are seeing lines crossed. If 11 years ago I buying a gym membership that you never use or buying some supplement filled with God knows what because people can put anything they want. They can put sawdust and dog poop and a supplement and you wouldn't have written a sitcom or a novel where the plot had the President of the United no. And they can get away with it most of the time. The third thing, it's not sexy to talk states. Cashing in on the prestige of the Oval Office, breaking every ethical norm breaking every actual law on corruption. I would have been left out of Hollywood saying that's so over the top. TJ it's not realistic about this sleep if you're staring at your cell phone at 10 o' clock at night, even in a silly sitcom way. It's so stupid. Stupid. No president would ever hey, and you need to get up at 6am to get to work or get to school. You basically destroyed your health right there. If you're looking at your cell phone to 10, you're probably not going to fall asleep till 11. You're not going to get degrade himself and the office of the White House by selling things like perfume. But we have a situation now where Trump has been selling there's so many it's hard to even know where to begin. Sneakers and bibles and it was good a night of sleep. You're guaranteed you didn't get your eight hours sleep. So so much of the phones recently and meme coins and meme coins for his wife and cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges. All of these things in any other period of this nation's history would have been denounced by everyone in any and every political party. A president would have been impeached. Secret to health really comes down to getting better sleep.